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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25912561">Previously On</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/violettathepiratequeen/pseuds/violettathepiratequeen'>violettathepiratequeen</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Comics who?, F/M, Gen, Multi, Other</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 02:42:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,134</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25912561</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/violettathepiratequeen/pseuds/violettathepiratequeen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>What happened in the Buffyverse after the fifth season of AtS, if there had been no comics to say otherwise. A series of character one-shots leading up to an actual story.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Spike/Buffy Summers, The Immortal (AtS)/Buffy Summers, Xander Harris/Original Female Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Temptation</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>“Live the day like it’s your last. ‘Cause it probably is.”<br/>
<br/>
</span>
  <span>Of course it was, and Spike knew that even before Angel had said it. This was the reason he’d been brought back. He had to fight this war, and he knew he would die in it, and that they wouldn’t win, but he had to try anyway. He didn’t know what it was about this fight in particular, and he never would have admitted it if it had been Angel’s rousing words, but for whatever reason, he knew stopping this, or killing himself trying, was the most important thing in the world. And he wasn’t afraid. He’d been feeling like he was in limbo ever since he came back, and he was ready to die tonight.<br/>
<br/>
</span>
  <span>He didn’t have to think about how he’d spend his last day, either. That idea had popped right into his head when Angel told his team to take the day off. Spike had known about this particular bar ever since he’d been given his apartment. But even though temptation was certainly there, he’d always told himself the only way he would actually go and...and get up on that stage was if he could arrange for the earth to swallow him up afterwards, and though he hadn’t meant it quite that literally, it seemed as if such a thing was about to be arranged. But going to a poetry slam felt  trivial, and petty almost, like he thought he could avenge his past self if he went and did it.<br/>
<br/>
</span>
  <span>But there was something that did matter, very much, and he’d been standing there, at the payphone inside the bar, for the past twenty-seven minutes with his hand reaching out and retreating at intervals, wrestling with whether he was going to do it or not.<br/>
<br/>
</span>
  <span>He could. He’d wheedled out of Wesley how to contact her, and now here he was, with that power at his fingertips. He wasn’t scared, not now, especially since there was still the matter of the earth being about to swallow him up. And he needed to hear her voice, he craved so desperately just to have some physical reminder that she was real…<br/>
<br/>
</span>
  <span>But at this point, it would be selfish. He should have done it before, if he was going to. He’d had his reasons for not telling her before now, but now it didn’t matter whether he’d been right or not, because he couldn’t tell her now. He couldn’t let her know he was alive on the day that he was just going to die again. It didn’t matter to her now if he was alive, since he might as well not be, and there would be nothing she could do about it if she even wanted to, if she didn’t still have that wanker of a boyfriend.<br/>
<br/>
</span>
  <span>He’d wrestled with the temptation of just running to her so many times before this. The more days that passed without her, the more he felt like he’d just made her up. That he’d fantasized their entire story, and really had been dead so much longer than nineteen days.<br/>
<br/>
</span>
  <span>And if she was feeling that way too, then that was a good thing. If she was able to consider him all a dream that she’d woken up from, then he couldn’t pull her back into that now. Impending apocalypse aside. Not telling her had always been the plan anyway. And so, so reluctantly that he changed his mind again half a dozen times before actually succeeding, he turned away and stepped towards the counter. </span><br/>
<br/>

  <span>He wondered if she’d ever find out afterwards. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Normal</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><span>She was amazing. </span><span><br/>
</span><span><br/>
</span><span>That was all Xander could ever think when he looked at her. Well, that wasn’t entirely true, he thought all kinds of things when he looked at her, but the word “amazing” always screamed the loudest. She was just so vibrant, and so intelligent, and so daffy...but in a smart way. She was Italian, and a chemistry major, and she would go on long discourses about her classes, and he almost never understood what she was talking about, but was happy just listening to her anyway. </span><span><br/>
</span><span><br/>
</span><span>After losing Anya, Xander had felt so lost and in the dark that he’d fully intended to stay out of the dating game for good. And for a while, that hadn’t been a problem. He’d been assigned to Africa, and then Canada, and finally to London, and though he’d met several girls along the way  who had shown an interest, Slayers, mostly, which he found ironic, he hadn’t looked at a single one of them until Catherine. </span><span><br/>
</span><span><br/>
</span><span>And she wasn’t even a Slayer. She wasn’t anything, in fact, she was just a college student who was...normal. He’d done background checks and subtle tests on her to make sure, though grappling with the fact that doing so was probably a little stalkerish. But if she was a demon, or a vampire, or even the cousin of a werewolf, he wanted to know. But she wasn’t anything of those things. She was fully human, and her family was also, fully human, and very extensive, which Xander found difficult when he started investigating them to the best of his abilities. At least they liked him well enough. <br/>
<br/>
</span><span>She shouldn’t have met him to begin with. They wouldn’t have met at all if the coffee shop hadn’t been so busy that day. But the barista had been calling somebody’s name for five minutes, and out of frustration shoved the drink into Xander’s hand. “There’s a girl sitting outside, will you see if this is hers? If it’s not she’s welcome to it anyway.” Xander had sputtered in protest, but she’d turned away and was focused on her other orders, so Xander mechanically walked outside and asked. <br/>
<br/>
</span><span>Catherine had thought it was a weak excuse for coming to talk to her, of course, and Xander later thanked his lucky stars that he hadn’t actually been trying to flirt with her, because he would inevitably have dropped a pick-up line and been chased away.  It hadn’t been her drink, in fact she was allergic to caffeine, but that had started her talking about how there should be a completely simple cure for that, and she was going to find it. And Xander found himself so fascinated, and her so...amazing that he sat down, forgetting about his own drink, until eventually some other customer was pressed into service and brought it out to him. <br/>
<br/>
</span><span>He missed the conference call that night. But he didn’t care. If he’d been on that call he would have only been thinking about all her black curly hair, or how expressively she waved her hands about when she was talking. He’d fallen for her, too fast, probably, but she’d seemed smitten with him, too, and when he blurted out that he wanted to see her again she’d jumped on that idea right away.</span><br/>
<br/>
They all wanted to meet her, of course, and she kept pestering to be introduced, but he couldn’t bear the thought of bringing her into the demon world. He told her all about it, and how to protect herself from vampires and such. But she...she was still normal. And he couldn’t lose another girl to the mission.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Confidante</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Andrew hated secrets. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well, he hated ones he couldn’t tell, anyway. He loved being told them, but when he couldn’t actually tell anyone else there was almost no point in having it to begin with.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He’d almost tripped up the minute he arrived back from L.A., and again at least once a day for the next several weeks. Eventually he found a loophole, and just began dropping hints about it, which he figured no one would pick up on because no one was expecting such a thing to have happened.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And he was right, but that didn’t satisfy him for long, and he eventually broke to his therapist. A therapist which he admitted that he didn’t really need, but what he didn’t admit was he liked the idea of someone who was being paid to listen to him talk about anything he wanted. She was nice, and he liked her, but she had been insistent that no one comes back from the dead, and no one survives an explosion that takes out an entire city. Andrew kept wanting to protest that it was a vampire, they could endure more, but he couldn’t say that. She didn’t know about the demon world, and even though a lot more people did now, families of Slayers for example, they still weren’t allowed to go around telling people who didn’t need to know. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>When Andrew couldn’t take it anymore, he burst out to her one day that his friend who had supposedly died in an explosion was alive, just as he’d always claimed, and not only alive, but back from the dead, just like Gandalf the...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then he stopped, and backpedaled, because the stricken look on her face reminded him that she didn’t know about these things. He quickly said that was what he thought, because he saw someone who looked like that friend, but he was wrong, of course, he wasn’t back, and he didn’t command Andrew not to tell anybody, and Andrew wasn’t sitting on this massive secret that would force everyone to really and properly pay attention to him for once, and would stir up so much drama that he wouldn’t need to count the days until the next </span>
  <em>
    <span>Harry Potter</span>
  </em>
  <span> book came out, and why did he have to be the confidante in this group, anyway?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’d looked worried, but had seized on that. “Your friends are entrusting you with more responsibilities, aren’t they? Let’s talk about that.” She seemed increasingly relieved that they had something else to talk about, but though Andrew obliged, he realized coming to her wasn’t fair. She would always think he was crazy, so long as she didn’t know about vampires and that you occasionally could come back to life if you were very lucky, or very unlucky, in the case of...well, everyone he’d known who had come back to life. And her job would never be finished. It wasn’t fair to make her a confidante, either. <br/><br/></span>
  <span>He stopped seeing her after that. He hadn’t really needed her, anyway. And their little Slayer organization really was trusting him with more, so there was that. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He supposed he could hold on to this secret. It was only meant to be a temporary thing anyway, wasn’t it?</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Doubt</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Was there such a thing as magic shaming? Because Willow was pretty sure she was experiencing it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She could handle people being skeptical of the mystic arts. She could handle even the people who hated all magic and tried to eradicate it. Looking at you, Salem Witch Trials. But there was a difference to dealing with the hatred of the outside world, and the hatred of those in your inner circle. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Especially your very inner circle. Especially when that circle included only one other person.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kennedy had been skeptical at best and terrified at worst when she’d first met Willow, of course. Again, another thing Willow could accept, and she understood her needing to come to terms with it. And Kennedy had seemed to. She certainly hadn’t minded when Willow reached into the furthest depths of...well, everything to make her a Slayer. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But it seemed that after that, she could never see the need for Willow to use magic. Ever. “We did the saving the world thing,” she’d say. “Shouldn’t you only be all magic girl for, like, emergencies?”<br/><br/></span>
  <span>They’d argued for a while after that, but eventually Willow backed down, when she realized this was exactly what had happened before. She’d ignored everyone around her that was telling her to go easy on it, don’t use it if you don’t have to, and here she was, right back where she’d started, and if she wasn’t careful and didn’t listen, she’d spiral right back down into-- </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But wait. She wasn’t spiraling. She wasn’t even using magic casually. She still, as far as she could see, was treading very carefully, and did only use magic when something attacked or when she was trying to locate or help other Slayers. Kennedy just really didn’t like seeing Willow use it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Willow’s friends had all been on her side when she told them. Kennedy was immediately reassigned to Toyko, and Willow to Toronto, and Willow couldn’t help wondering if they’d thought she and Kennedy were doomed from the start. But they hadn’t said anything, to their credit. They’d only ever been supportive, and now they were completely supportive in this. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But now Willow was starting to doubt that she’d been correct. Because now that she really thought about it, it hadn’t just been Kennedy. All of them had been scared at her, and not just because of Dark Willow. They’d discouraged her when she was just starting out, they’d blamed her when she tried things she wasn’t ready for, and even though they welcomed her back with open arms after her stint as a villain,  she’d always noticed them giving her side glances. Like they were tiptoeing around her. Like she’d surrounded herself with little baby crabs that they couldn’t step on and okay that was a weird analogy and eggshells would have been a better one. They knew she was powerful and they were happy to have her use it, but they also were scared to see her push herself. They didn’t know where she’d end up. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Magic shaming. She didn’t blame them. She didn’t know how she was lucky enough for them to forgive her for all that she did, and she would have been scared of her, too. It was just difficult, was all. It was difficult that...they might have been right all along.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Change</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Change. It just kept coming and coming. And Dawn could never do a thing about it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She couldn’t save her mother. She couldn’t keep everyone with her even with the help of a wish. She couldn’t prevent her friends and loved ones from getting hurt, or killed, over and over. When Sunnydale had exploded, Dawn was just happy that they’d won and that her sister was standing beside her, but in the days that followed, she began to feel very out of place. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She hated being so cut off from everything she’d ever known. She hated that she essentially had to build her entire life over from scratch. She didn’t say anything, because of course she wasn’t the only one going through that, but she noticed that everyone else seemed to be taking it better. It actually surprised Dawn how okay they all seemed with it. Living in Brazil? No problem. Have to learn Italian all of a sudden? Bring it on. Figure out the African currency? It’s probably intuitive. And they weren’t even bothered that they were, more or less, figuring this all out by themselves. They all went in teams of at least two, including the Slayers that had survived the battle, but still, they were all split up trying to live in foreign countries, and it just seemed so jarring and other-worldly. Culture shock was a serious malady. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She hated going to school in Rome, but when she moved to London that was actually easier, by comparison. And she thought it was kind of cool, the way British schools were set up.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But that wasn’t the point. The point was that though everyone spoke fondly of Sunnydale, they all were acting like they could just uproot if and when they ever had to. Dawn had thought Sunnydale would always be there for her, and now she couldn’t even let herself get adjusted to this life, because it seemed like if a meteor blew up the planet, her friends would just shrug and find a new one. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>So, maybe she should try this change thing, too. She went and blew a good portion of her savings on an entirely new wardrobe, which she immediately stuffed out of sight because she realized she could never be seen wearing that stuff, not by people who knew her, anyway. But she did wear it, she wore it out to a club, and sat alone with her club soda wondering what she was thinking. This was her big drastic change? A kid in a club by herself? A nearly-high-school-graduate, but a minor nonetheless.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And then it happened, and some guy sat next to her and said, “No one’s offered to help you drink your sorrows away?” In the history of pickup lines--well, she didn’t even know if it could qualify as a pickup line. And it was creepy, and it was wrong, but, she had a stake in her purse, and some other things besides if stuff got weird. So she let him buy her something that she couldn’t remember the name of afterwards, and she drank it, and she felt better.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well, no. She felt worse. But in a better kind of way. And it was an experience she enjoyed, and one she repeated every time she felt she could get away with it. She kept control of the situation, never letting anyone taking her home, never getting uncontrollably drunk, never giving her sister any reason to worry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Was it wrong? Probably, but she clung to it anyway. Being a drastically different person from who she was...she needed this to fake it, for them, but they could never, never know how much she had changed.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Danger</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Giles was feeling cautiously optimistic about the state of things. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It had never occurred to him that defeating the First would have meant the destruction of Sunnydale, and he mourned its loss and the people who had lost their lives there just like everyone else. But when it was over, he realized that by spreading out all over the world, and recruiting and training Slayers, they were making the world a better place. And he hadn’t even been the one to come up with this plan, which just made him all the prouder of those who had. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were organizations being set up in the most major cities, and the plan was to keep going down the list until there was one in every city. It would take years, and likely everyone alive right now would be dead before it happened, but it was still the dream. There was still evil out in the world--some of the new Slayers had hoped defeating the First Evil would mean all evil was eradicated from the world, but of course that wasn’t the case. But the new recruits seemed to be doing fairly well with keeping it in check.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Officially, everyone was still supposed to check in with Giles and let them know what was going on. And they did, for the most part, and he appreciated it, while he, in his big house in London, tried gathering all the files and sources that the Watcher’s Council used to have. And he was content with that. He kept in contact with them enough to still feel like he was involved, but he also was happy to be left alone with his research and his studying, doing his part by engaging in his favorite hobby. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But, this had only been going on for maybe eight months, when he began to feel somewhat restless. He supposed it made sense, Ripper’s sense of danger and adventure had never quite died, but in the past every time they’d gone out to fight demons it hadn’t been because he wanted to. He always claimed he would much rather stay out of it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But now he was staying out of it, and he was starting to miss it. He could hear Ethan Rayne snickering at him, saying he’d been right all along, and Giles really had never changed. Which was nonsense of course, because Giles had grown up, and Ethan never had. And being a wise and responsible adult, for the most part, Giles decided to pop round and see what his Slayer was up to.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He didn’t tell her he was coming, and she was never to find out. Because when he arrived, it was at a wedding, some friend of the Immortal’s, or so he gathered. It could have been her friend too, he supposed. When he arrived at the reception, he saw a woman in a long purple cloak hovering in the corner. He made his way over to her, and did not fail to notice the gun she was trying to conceal. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She turned to him, and there was a fire in her eyes. “Stay out of this, Ripper,” she said in a low voice. “You’ve already succeeded in staying out of their lives. Now it is time to stay out of their deaths.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>If the intent was to make him lose focus for a moment, it worked. But only for a moment, because he grabbed the gun just as she was getting ready to fire, and she looked at him in horror before fleeing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Well, he’d wanted danger and adventure. And finding out who she was would likely include both. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Living</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>She never talked about him. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wondered, vaguely, if her friends were surprised by that. It wasn’t that she refused to mention his name, and she hadn’t forbidden anyone else from talking about him if he came up in conversation. She just, for her part, didn’t want to share his memory with any of them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Because none of them had been close to him. Not really. Not that they’d ever wanted to be. They’d tolerated him for her sake, but they’d only tried to get along with him when they needed something from him. She knew she herself had done the same...but it hadn’t ended that way. They hadn’t parted that way. Even though when he was dying he had told her...well, what he told her, she knew that they had been close. They had found each other. And she could have given him more, if she’d just let herself. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But he’d told her to go on. More than once, he’d picked her up when she wanted to stop fighting, and he pushed her forward. And she knew that, down there in the hellmouth, he was doing it again. Pushing her forward, telling her never to stop, not to give in, not to die when there was so much yet to do.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were times where she drifted into what-ifs. At night, especially, she would lay awake and wonder what would have happened if she’d stayed. If she’d tried to save him. If she’d let someone else wear the amulet. But she couldn’t entertain those thoughts for long, because, she knew it would drag her down if she thought too much about it. It would be harder to go on living. She’d been down that road, and if she didn’t have anyone to pull her off it anymore, then she had to be careful not to go anywhere near it. She just wished someone would tell that to her nightmares, was all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was a good thing she loved her work. She loved finding and training the new Slayers, and her own slaying still gave her a sense of satisfaction. She knew she was incredibly lucky to have her team willing to stick by her and start up the Slayer organization. It was important work, and saving the world was nothing new to her, but it felt even better that she didn’t have to do it alone anymore. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And really, she wasn’t alone, or so she kept telling herself. She wasn’t. She was still her sister’s guardian, and her friends were only a phone call away. The Immortal seemed devoted to her, and the Slayers came to her with problems that she herself had experienced, which enabled her to fill a big sister role for them that she would have loved to have when she was first called.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But there was a hole. There was definitely a gap, and she knew it could never be filled. She could get over it--she was over it, totally--but it would still always be there. Because he’d understood her like no one else, and...hang on, was that a jet about to land behind her apartment building?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She immediately assumed the worst, and grabbed a sword as she took off running towards the jet. She was surprised when one lone blue demon emerged, who stared at her and seemed to be sizing her up. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Buffy,” the demon said eventually. “The Vampire Slayer. The white-haired vampire is dying, and Angel says you would be the one he’d desire to have at his side. You must come at once.”</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Aaaand the first chapter of "These Endless Days" will be up tomorrow.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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